undecisive

> We cannot truly know someone's intent.

Oh, you can get pretty close. What you do is you look at their attitudes towards the marginalized individuals, to marginalized communities, their opinions as a whole, their advocacy, their friendship groups, etc.

If, on balance, they appear to support and promote people of colour or transgender people (as much as they do any other people group) - then this person is probably not racist or transphobic.

However, that's haaarrrd. And doing that groundwork doesn't win you clicks as a media outlet. Whipping up a mob does win you clicks however. And advertising revenue.

And then many people - who have only read those articles - shout about it, like mobs tend to do, it seems like it has universal approval, and people assume it's probably true.

If you don't define words like "racist" and "transphobic" to be solely about intent, those words become meaningless.

Yeah, there was some weirdness on that - they tried to change it and things went wrong.

If you have a look at the updates, specifically the Week 42 Update, they have a revised timeline:

Final Astro - PCB March 2021

Production Master - March 2021

Final Testing and Debugging - May 2021

Device Certifications - May 2021

Mass Production Start – June 2021

First shipping - June 2021

They're more or less on track, it seems...

I'm also looking forward to the Slide. Interesting to note that even with all the kerfuffle surrounding their processor "downgrade" during production, the Astro Slide should be a bit more powerful [1]

Hopefully it will land sooner too...

[1] https://nanoreview.net/en/soc-compare/qualcomm-snapdragon-66...

I think the problem is that the site seems a little confused about what it wants. I'd consider:

> [we are] interested in developing applications without frameworks.

... and ...

> nor we will ever create campaigns against frameworks

to be in direct contradiction, yet these are in the very first paragraph.

Reading this page, I'd take it as a rallying cry against useless libraries that could be replaced with a few of lines in your codebase that can be understood and changed and adapted, rather than depending on a generic unchangable external source.

Reading the manifesto itself (following the github link) it sounds like a rallying cry against something else entirely - management-dictated technical decisions.

But maybe the confusion is intentional. People will read into it what they want to see.

Yeah. I'd also say if it significantly changes the way you code, it's a framework. So I wouldn't consider jQuery a framework, because you could replace any jQuery call with one or more lines of vanilla javascript.

I would call react or backbone.js or angular etc frameworks, because you would have to completely restructure your codebase in most cases - or, at least, create compatible clones of those libraries.

Exactly!

The problem is, when do you consider a library more than a library though? And when do you consider yourself more bound to the "framework" than not?

I'd say given the way that react completely inverts the way you structure the code you write, that's more of a framework packaged in a library. It's not a library you can just move away from (unless you like writing DOM compilers in your spare time, or you plan to move to one of the clones written by people who like writing DOM compilers in their spare time).

Do we consider Ruby on Rails a framework? And if so (because the site makes the distinction...) is it the kind we should only use until we can "code without it"? What about in Java-land, Spring or Struts or Hibernate (or even Swing, though that comes packaged with Java so maybe isn't included in the question) - should these be avoided or embraced? (for reasons other than the horror show that each might be)? And then there's PHP frameworks - too numerous to number, but given the pain of trying to write secure PHP code definitely worth considering - do the security benefits outweigh the risks?

I feel like the summary of the original post is "Know your stack" - and that's a great message - but the page conflates Frameworks (which are generally a good thing to use at least until you reach guru status) with spurious libraries that do next to nothing yet introduce another attack vector.

I'm all for developing apps with fewer dependencies - libraries or frameworks. Totally against developing apps without frameworks.

I'm in the same boat - looking at them both in quick succession, I chose to back nim because the error messages I got from Crystal were unusable.

Now that it is at 1.0, I agree - worth serious reconsideration. That said, it sounds like Nim's concurrency is far more mature than Crystals, and Nim works well on arm etc. So definitely worth another look, but might be a couple more years before I'm able to use it in anger unfortunately.

I think the issue here is that you've misunderstood the politics of these kinds of "resignations".

In the public mind (even if not in reality) when someone "resigns" because of "past comments", they have either been given an ultimatum - "Jump or be pushed" - or they are experiencing intrusions into their personal life (or there is behaviour from the community that makes this person believe these intrusions are imminent)

My understanding at the time was that it was the former - there were murmurings of possible action against him, and whether it was to avoid harm to the FSF or risk the public damage to his reputation I have no idea, but he decided to gracefully step aside.

So yes, officially you may be correct - but especially with someone like RMS, it is highly unlikely that he just chose to resign because he previously made comments that people didn't like. RMS is very used to making controversial statements and weathering the storm, I find it unlikely (though not impossible) that this was just one storm he couldn't weather - and much more likely that he chose the path of least damage, to himself or his cause or his legacy.

Haha, I've had this idea rattling about my brain for some time too (though mine went a bit further in scope instead - all sorts of crop pest control for small-scale farming situations, such as greenfly, caterpillars, etc, with training to avoid positive visitors such a bees)

Early on, I dismissed ultrasound - unless some kind of funky triangulation went on, I think the resolution would be far too low and risk of false positives too high - but I'd be interested to hear any thoughts you had on how that might work. That said, recognising the flight noises of certain bugs would make sense to me - only as a way to trigger a stop-and-sweep cycle though.

But as much as the idea excites me, "real" exploration of the space will only happen when I get lots of time and a fair bit of money - and maybe some land! Alas, I'm nowhere near that point yet.

Absolutely this. While I'm mildly curious what will come of dokku + kubernetes (and maybe a little excited, though have tempered expectations), actually setting up some simple scripting that points to dokku means I can be fairly sure that when I've set up a dokku box, the databases are backed up, should the box go down and all the backups get fried, I can have a new box set upp they will be back up and running in much less than an hour from the point that I notice.

So the only reason I might want something like Flynn is in the case of unexpected uptick in load. And unfortunately, in my first experience with Flynn, things went bad and I wasn't able to restore from backups, which scared me off more than I was scared about load balancing (read: ran out of time for the experiments and vowed "one day I'll try again. Maybe."). That said, overall flynn did seem reasonably polished, so I'm sad about the announcement.

Maybe, some day, someone will take on this middle ground between Dokku and Kubernetes. But until then, Dokku has definitely proved itself.

Nope.

Otherwise, one could argue that some programming languages use newlines to separate commands, therefore the file type is NSV (newline separated values), and therefore NSV is a programming language, and any newline-separated file is a program. This is clearly nonsense.

Sometimes people confuse the medium with the language. YAML may be the medium in which programming instructions are conveyed, but it never makes YAML a programming language, irrespective of the file extension. If you put lines of bash into a YAML array, the YAML itself still only contains data. If you pass that data file to something that can take the bash lines out and make use of them, then great.

Essentially, it's a storage medium - just a slightly higher-level storage medium than we're used to thinking about. You could create a programming language syntax that is entwined with YAML, but then the language would be more correctly named something like Whatever-over-YAML (or Whatever for short)

1. Yes. A subset of human legal history would give you that information. You could argue they did that, just chose the wrong subset.

From a planning perspective though, it isn't the rule changes that are the problem; it's the types of input. For example, if you write a system that says "Given X class of crime, and they were convicted in year Y, and Z much time already incarcerated, return f(X, Y, Z) days left". If you can build all your rules around that, that's great.

If you then say "Oh, but for crimes a, b and d, we need to take into account some measure of inmate behaviour" - you now need to incorporate a whole new path from that data point to your decider, and all these functions need to accept this information and either use it or discard it - and that might take some time. (I should insert a discussion about monads as a design pattern that would simplify this code and remove this excuse... but we'll assume ignorance of that for now)

So the question is whether this is some new datapoint that they should have already expected. Maybe it wasn't - but if that's the case, then they definitely looked at the wrong subset of legal history.

2. and 3. are moot points in my opinion. Your configuration system is the basis for all your existing rules. They already have multiple rules, so they have a baseline for saying that the configuration system is sound. If your configuration system fails to properly account for unused datapoints, then fine. But as I mention elsewhere, configurability doesn't necessarily mean end-user configurability. A well-written system should not be resistant to change.

Yes and no. It's a bit like saying "Oh, I didn't know it was going to rain - it was lovely and sunny outside when I wrote the code".

A big (some might say forgotten) part of the procurement and development process is research - know your customer, know your market, know your niche.

In this case, that includes

- know how prisons work

- know how the system will be administered

- know how recent law changes might be handled by the system

- know how often prisoners need / deserve workarounds

- know how quickly law changes need to be reflected in code

Also, I'm not saying that the user interface needs to contain this. But we should always advocate for modular systems that are easy to maintain through addition, rather than through re-writes.

If it is genuinely difficult to add a new type of inmate release schedule, then that is poor planning.

But again, I'm not necessarily subscribing to that theory. Money is involved, so facts are in the eye of the sales team.

But I'm also not not subscribing to that theory.

The problem with human beings is we are all different.

Half the people might want (and need) summary-only content. But many people do not trust the editorial spin that most news outlets put on their summaries.

I agree to some extent that a subsidized news media has value (though this needs to be entirely divorced from any kind of control, because even if the government tries to be hands-off with it, if there is even the possible threat of pulling funds, the news outlets start pulling their punches and failing to hold the government to account. Governments are very bad at this, and benefit greatly from doing this badly)

The way the current system works though, and I think what you are saying is, currently those summary-only people are being subsidised by those who are willing to read the full articles (and endure the adverts)

This in itself provides incentives for the publishers to provide low-quality summaries (think clickbait, but many other techniques exist) to force users into their site. For those who cannot deal with the full articles (e.g. eyesight impaired, language barriers and attention deficit), this puts them at a disadvantage, and leaves them more susceptible to misinformation and half-stories.

Aggregators, on the other hand, provide competition, which may be enough to ensure some baseline quality.

So I agree that the route you are proposing has merit; but also there is danger in it, and unless the government is going to stipulate fees that are commercially viable for the likes of Google, the net damage outweighs the gains.

Also, I've not seen anything that tells me this is what the government are doing or that it is even part of their game-plan. But then, maybe it's just not included in the summaries?

That's encouraging news. Do you use a lot of sites with SSO? Are they mostly mainstream (where I would class MS Teams to fall in that bracket) or do they tend to be more niche services?

(I totally accept that my "50% of SSO systems will be broken by this" to be a worst-case random number i-have-no-idea-but-for-all-I-know value. Probably shouldn't have been so blasé about it! But very much interested to hear what real-world values look like)

I agree with pretty much everything you've said :)

I guess my gripe is more "Why does the world not work right" than "Firefox has done a stinker here".

And I suppose my reaction really should be "How can we work to give Firefox a leg up, while still encouraging it to intentionally fail many of the metrics most people care about".

It's a hard battle to fight. Don't suppose Google will implement these things that might hurt their user tracking businesses... yeah?... no?... no.

> thanks to the popularity of content blockers like Pi-Hole and uBlockOrigin

Unfortunately these are "block these please" which hurts all the big players for the tiny portion of web users that use them. Every time I've ever moved a feature in software I've written from "all except this" to "none except this", it has always failed spectacularly, at least for a few people. The fact that users will get an option to unblock the services they need is encouraging... the fact that they mention that users might see the dialog multiple times for the same service is not.

But yes, I will try to be hopeful - and you are right, the fact that Firefox does this kind of thing is a big part of the reason I use them in the first place.

I commend Firefox for trying to do this... but it worries me.

3 obvious holes:

- Proliferation of dialogs. When you don't know whether a site will suddenly break or not, standard users will be implicitly trained to say yes to all dialogs.

- Domain "homogenizing" (spoofing) services will win. Trackers that offer a widget you can install on your server will win. Facebook et all will still know where they sent you, and will be able to track you server side. If mozilla provide a centralized whitelist, then SSO providers who also provide trackers will win. Essentially, the big players will find a way, the little players (who users weren't worried about anyway) will still lose.

- The web will break. SSO will be broken for a good couple of months on over 50% of websites using it - possibly more. "This only works in Google Chrome" will become more and more popular. Potentially, Firefox doesn't have the market share to make this work.

Those of us who will stick with Firefox regardless are in for a world of pain, and not a lot of gain. I guess it's necessary to move the web on, but the pessimist in me doesn't see that happening any time soon.

FB: We provide you reach and you get advertising revenue because of it. Why would we pay you for something you benefit from?

AU: Because.

FB: We'll just stop giving you reach...

AU: Like to see you try

FB: ...

AU: Yeah, maybe that doesn't work for us after all.

I wonder what would have happened if this had been in the US. I'm guessing that Australia's news content is a nice-to-have, and not (yet) part of their core revenue. Some consumers probably enjoyed having fewer news items appear in their feed. It hurt Facebook a little, but it hurt news providers more.

It's the problem with silver bullets like YAGNI: Laws change, if your system is dependent on laws, then you can be sure that new rules will need to be added. You need a system that is configurable, you can be sure you are going to need it.

Of course, if there's money to be made in having a change-resistant system, well that's a different story. YAGNIAYWPTTNFI (You ARE gonna need it, and you will pay through the nose for it) isn't quite as catchy though

I'm assuming that's the same Dr. Carl Hart from this interview?

Driving was my go-to analogy too (I've got a longer post where I go into it) Surely there's the concept of legal drugs though too? You're allowed to have wine, but not drive at 120 miles per hour past school gates.

My feeling is that there's a difference between "safe" and "worth the risk". And as far as lawmakers are concerned, for most drugs there's not case where it's worth the risks.

Reminds me of a quote from Love Actually:

> Hiya kids. Here is an important message from your Uncle Bill. Don't buy drugs. Become a pop star, and they give you them for free.

... except in this case the message is don't do drugs kids, but "grown ups" should (as defined as a state of maturity where you know how the drugs behave, know your limits and can balance your experimentation with fulfilling your societal obligations)

I see this as a bit like speeding. The government sets fairly arbitrary speed limits for different types of road. They do it based on what they think the majority of people can cope with, versus the likelihood of risks, vs the need to get from A to B in a reasonable amount of time. The government hasn't been amazingly scientific about the speed limits, and don't take into account time of day, traffic, weather conditions etc. A healthy, fully-alert person can probably go at 150% of the speed limit on an ambient clear day on an empty road - and do so perfectly safely. But that isn't the message they give people, because it would be impossible to assess person-by-person, minute-by-minute.

And yet, some would consider the above information to be recklessly given, because some people will on read "go at 150% of the speed limit... perfectly safely" and take that as my advice.

So the question is, should it be legal to travel at any speed, provided you feel like you're doing a good job of it? In both cases, misjudgement can be disastrous for yourself and the people around you (and innocent bystanders too)

And when you are talking about something that can alter your perceptions, you would surely need a non-drug-taking associate with you at all times who could give you an honest blow-by-blow assessment of where you are dropping the ball as a "normal" human being, and where your drug-fuelled failings are happening?

When the potential downsides so vastly outweigh the benefits, I can understand why laws take the side they do. That said, I absolutely do think that there are massive downsides to making drugs illegal when taken responsibly. Countries should be realistic about what they can and can't do. If they can't eradicate drug use - and most countries can't - they need to put effort into safeguarding above incarceration.

But I think that's the consensus anyway on most social issues. And it seems to be a lesson that governments globally are very slow to learn.

I'd argue there's probably a lot of really good reasons for that... primarily, most people did not get the announcement from the horse's mouth.

https://youtu.be/LE0g2TUsJ4U?t=3242

If you watch that for 5 minutes, Matz makes it clear that a) it's a goal, not a promise, and b) he's basing this on ruby 2.0

I don't know how you can set expectations any clearer than that (other than maybe not to announce any goals ever, or chase down the 3rd parties reporting on your goals with a torch and pitchfork, demanding that they fix their lazy reporting)

We have a weird relationship with our royals, similarly with our House of Lords. Lots of people seem to want rid of them, and many have half-good reasons on a theoretical level, but nobody really has any solutions to the problems they solve.

To take a recent example from a country that shall remain nameless, how do you stop a magalomaniac from duping half the population with a mix of nationalist rhetoric and promises of rolling back any half-uncomfortable environmental or sociological progress? If the whole government gets tainted at the same time, even if the country realises its mistake half a decade later, the money wasted in switching the laws back - the economic equality and environmental progress lost, the damage to international relations... all because the person in charge doesn't actually care about the country, and there is no ironclad process for getting them out of power (besides the collective power of a government that is either scared of his voter influence, or realises their power is contingent on his)

None of the laws this article claims the Queen has "influenced" worry me in the slightest. It doesn't benefit anyone to know how much wealth she has (in fact, if something should happen and her wealth fluctuates drastically, that could cause more damage to public and international perception than good) and the law has always maintained, as far as I'm aware, that many driving laws do not apply on private property - Sandringham et al being considered private property for the purposes of this law makes logical sense to me. The national monuments one is just bizarre, smacks of a power-grab by government - albeit a petty one. I suspect it was a way of getting more tourist revenue. But either way, its not exactly earth shattering.

"But what if Prince William becomes king and uses these powers for evil purposes?" I hear you cry. Well, in that case something will change. Either an uprising will happen or evil will be done. Though as long the monarchy's well-being for their whole life is entwined with the country's well-being, there is less likelihood that a sane king or queen would rock the boat significantly.

I seriously doubt that this is the law that will cause the next major catastrophe. As that certain other country has proven, unbridled democracy is a more potent threat.

Wow. The meta-ness of this humour almost defeated me, well played :D

Could have been the deadpan nature of the joke, or maybe it's just because I'm tired. Maybe it's because people correcting things badly because they fundamentally don't understand them is a pet peeve.

But maybe also because I don't recognise top-posted quotes as being part of the body of a work. Some how, my brain slots it into its own little area "this is simply context you need to know to understand the author's statement - not something the author wanted to communicate directly to you" - so by the time I had finished reading the quote, and the commentary on the quote, I had forgotten what the quote actually says.

I wonder if that's an argument for re-voicing square brackets - it forces you to read the quote in the voice of the author, maybe then my brain would treat the comment as a whole.

Either I'm completely misunderstanding you, or you are not reading my words. Specifically you've just replied to this whole paragraph that addresses what you are saying completely:

> Then, look at the context - I said "answers that are dangerous, vulnerable, misleading, or represent an extreme viewpoint as fact (...)" - I intended the above three statements to be an example of the latter, I figured that people can easily imagine dangerous / vulnerable / misleading SO posts themselves. But yes, while I do consider there to be dangerous effects from stating a subjective viewpoint as an absolute like this, I do think that the above statements take a reasonable yet subjective statement like "Few pieces of advice have served me as well as [avoid OOP]" into a totally unreasonable objective statement "it's the only way to make good programs"

Please quote me the bit where I say that I "downvote other ideas because they (the ideas) are dangerous” - I said very clearly that I downvote answers that are dangerous.

An answer is a concrete expression of an idea, but an idea can be correct without the answer being correct. (an extreme example: "We should improve the overall health of our nation" might be a completely valid idea, yet "shoot the disabled" is a completely wrong answer that embodies that idea but takes it in absolutely the wrong direction.)

> Yet you’ve done nothing to explain such an extreme and unreasonable point of view.

Alright, let's flip it: "Functional Programming is dangerous". I can use FP to write a program that accidentally wipes a hard disk. Therefore FP is dangerous. Argue against that.

Functional Programming, when used correctly, mitigates some of the dangers of Object Orientation. Arguably, a correctly written Object Oriented module should not be any less safe than a module correctly written in a Functional style.

You can argue (and probably do) that the implementations of Functional Programming that you enjoy using make writing correct code easier. And that is a valid statement.

But saying "OOP is dangerous" is no more valid than saying "FP is dangerous". Saying "Haddock are slimy and disgusting which is why I prefer Cod". No, fish are slimy and disgusting, and these are both fish. Maybe there are degrees by which some fish are slimier than others, but that doesn't justify an out-of-context vilification of Haddock.

So let me tell you some things that are more dangerous to your code and project than OO:

- Using a language or paradigm that your team are not familiar with

- Using tools that force you to distance your variable and method names from the domain-specific words that the specification is written in

- Premature optimisation

- Following every new framework and fad that comes along.

So yes, it is extreme and unreasonable to categorically state that "OOP is dangerous".

As an answer, it deserves to be downvoted.

As an idea, it has merit and deserves to be explored and justified and compared.

In a place of ideas (like Hacker News) that statement is perfectly acceptable (if not entirely helpful)

In a place of answers (like Stack Overflow), it is misleading and dangerous in that it encourages far more dangerous behaviours.

Again, I agree, but only in context.

On Hacker News, I totally agree that downvoting debatable views that are expressed poorly is totally unnecessary. If it isn't a statement that is outright dangerous or intentionally hurtful, my bar for downvoting here is very high. I would trust the audience to discern for themselves.

On Stack overflow, you are essentially there to teach people something. "Don't ever do X" is not going to teach something. Unpopular ideas (and even some popular ones) should be backed up with cogent reasoning, and I think downvoting (with an explanation) is the best way to tell future visitors "this is (probably) not the answer you are looking for".

> You did not explain how this is dangerous whatsoever. What about all those companies or teams out there using exclusively functional programming and succeeding? Their own experience would be evidence that avoiding OOP is good (as it has been good, demonstrably, for them). If they merely spoke from their own experience and attested to the good things that demonstrably came from avoiding OOP, you would consider that dangerous?

I can't tell whether you're intentionally building a straw-man here. My original example of a downvotable comment had three statements:

"object orientation is dangerous": It clearly isn't. Badly written object oriented software can be dangerous, and you can argue that OO languages could do more to promote safety within themselves, but that doesn't make OO as a theoretical construct a bad thing, or all OO code bad, or all OO developers wrong.

"you must write C++ using functional paradigms": Again, there are separate challenges when writing fully FP-style C++, certainly there is nothing to say you MUST write C++ that way. And many projects would probably not welcome you rewriting their codebase in that way. If someone goes back to their employer / open-source project / teachers and tells them they are doing it wrong because their code contains OO, they may well be laughed out of the door.

"it's the only way to make good programs": This is obviously a lie.

Then, look at the context - I said "answers that are dangerous, vulnerable, misleading, or represent an extreme viewpoint as fact (...)" - I intended the above three statements to be an example of the latter, I figured that people can easily imagine dangerous / vulnerable / misleading SO posts themselves. But yes, while I do consider there to be dangerous effects from stating a subjective viewpoint as an absolute like this, I do think that the above statements take a reasonable yet subjective statement like "Few pieces of advice have served me as well as [avoid OOP]" into a totally unreasonable objective statement "it's the only way to make good programs"

Also, take a look at my later statement "Everything is a balance of strengths and weaknesses, and there are times when OO is the right tool for the job." I thought it would be relatively clear from this that there must always be times where OO is not the right tool for the job. My original statement was not an attempt to bad-mouth FP. But telling beginners to never use X because it's evil for whatever reason does have its dangers, whether that paradigm is FP or OOP.

> any use case solvable by OOP is also solvable with at least equal quality and equal satisfaction of the constraints using functional programming.

I suspect games programmers and kernel devs might disagree with that. But even if not, I would say that the bar you have set is terribly low. To my mind, a good program should also be readable, expressive, and in keeping with the project's coding standards. Generally, that's where I find that even some well-written FP code may fall down. But again, that's not an argument against FP itself, because I would not argue against FP. As I said before...

> A comment like "I would prefer to see this in a functional paradigm, with as few side effects as possible" is absolutely fine.

In fact, I would go as far as to say I might even agree with that statement. I certainly wouldn't downvote it. Sure, I'd like to see better arguments about why the side effects in that case are a problem, and why FP might be able to improve the code. But that is a perfectly valid and true statement. But hopefully now you can see why that statement is materially different to "object orientation is dangerous, you must write C++ using functional paradigms, it's the only way to make good programs".

(love the fact that this comment was downvoted! Sorry for the effect that has on your karma though)

The dangerous part is presuming that no good software can come from OO. A comment like "I would prefer to see this in a functional paradigm, with as few side effects as possible" is absolutely fine.

The statement that all OO is bad makes an absolute out of a subjective, rubbishes the work and effort of millions and may cause a relative beginner to ignore learning a paradigm that is fundamental to their growth and learning as a developer.

Now then, that said... if you wanted an argument over avoiding OOP, I would argue any statement that categorically says "Avoid X" is an oversimplification. Everything is a balance of strengths and weaknesses, and there are times when OO is the right tool for the job. You are welcome to disagree, and I wouldn't downvote you for doing so _in this context_, but in a Stack Overflow context, depending on how you say it, I very well might if I considered your words dangerous enough.

(i.e. Silver bullets kill more than just werewolves)

That would be a nice feature. Or much like a "report" button on some platforms, if clicking downvote meant you had to say why you had disliked, and it gives you the usual moderation options, all the other comments that it could auto-upvote, or a free-text field that automatically creates a comment... that would probably be the least-friction way of dealing with it.

Absolutely. Usually there's no problem in doing both (hence, I guess, the OP)

But commenting without downvoting skews the ordering algorithms, and of course if someone else has already made a similar enough comment that you wouldn't be adding materially to the conversation, adding a similar comment just makes the post look busy an therefore, potentially, interesting.